Former U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Sergio Kochergin leaned over the microphone, his voice breaking as he told members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus of his two tours in Iraq. After the taking of Baghdad during the invasion, Kochergin said, he found a parking lot full of civilian pick-up trucks and "used them for a roller-derby. We would either ram into each other or ram into the walls, while Iraqi people watched us asking for their vehicles."
That pretty much set the tone for his two deployments, Kochergin said. His unit almost never did humanitarian work. Civilians were regularly threatened, shot, and killed. By the end of his second tour in 2005, Kochergin said enlisted members of his unit were given AK-47s for use as "drop weapons," by their chain of command.
"If the person who was shot did not have a weapon," he said, "an AK-47 would be placed near his corpse, and when the unit would come back to the base they would use it to identify the shot man as an enemy combatant."
Two weeks ago, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) spoke at a forum on Capitol Hill organized by the Progressive Caucus. The forum grew out of an event IVAW organized in Maryland earlier this year called, "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan -- Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations."
IVAW is inspired by the Winter Solider tribunal held in 1971 by Vietnam War veterans. For four days in March, 60 veterans spoke to a hall filled with 200 of their peers, giving first-hand accounts of atrocities they personally committed or witnessed while deployed overseas.
Over the last two months, members of IVAW have tried to find a more official forum for their comments. Initially, they sought a full congressional committee hearing where they could be sworn in and testify under oath. When such an opportunity didn't materialize quickly, they turned to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose co-chairs, California Democrats, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, have been among the most ardent critics of the Iraq War.
Woolsey called the Congressional Progressive Caucus forum for May 15, to coincide with congressional consideration of the newest war-funding bill. So as the House of Representatives debated an $186 billion appropriation, nine veterans of the Iraq War told their stories before a small group (seven came and went throughout) of representatives and a packed gallery. One of the veterans had also served in Afghanistan. About 40 veterans were in the audience.
The veterans spoke about extremely lax rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they said virtually guaranteed that atrocities would be committed, and which in turn created a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a continued cycle of violence.
Marine Corps veteran Vincent Emanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005, said that U.S. military personnel often took "pot shots" at passing cars.
"Our rules of engagement stated that we should first fire warning shots into the ground in front of the car, then the engine block, and the windshield. That is if the car was even moving in the first place," he said. "Many times cars that actually had pulled off to the side of the road were also shot at."
Former U.S. Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalvan, who served directly under Gen. David Petraeus in 2005 and 2006, wore a full array of medals to the hearing. His Combat Action Badge, two Bronze Stars, Purple Heart, and Army Commendation Medals were pinned just below his heart. "We have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies [that] paint a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq," he said.
Montalvan testified that he personally witnessed U.S. military personnel carrying out waterboarding, the mock-drowning interrogation technique that has long been considered torture by U.S. courts.
It was January 2004 in al-Walid near the Syrian border. Two counterintelligence officers stopped a truck full of fake medicine being smuggled into Iraq and brought the driver in for questioning.
"I was there, and I watched not liking it to make sure they weren't going to kill him," Montalvan told the Prospect after the hearing. "They lifted his legs. They laid him down. They blindfolded him. Then they lifted his legs again and started pouring water down his throat."
"After seeing that, I knew that's something that we oughtn't be doing," he said. "It's torture. It made me feel uncomfortable." Former Marine Corps Sgt. Adam Kokesh presented a picture of himself standing, smiling, in front of a dead Iraqi civilian that another marine had shot.
Kokesh said his Marine Corps Civil Affairs team, including a major, was present when the trophy photo was taken. Numerous other marines also snapped their pictures with the corpse, he said. Similar photos surfaced during and after the Vietnam War.
"At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said, 'Don't ever let your government do this to you. Don't ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and disregard for human life is acceptable or common.' And we are still doing this to service members every day as long as these occupations continue," Kokesh added.
When Vietnam veterans organized the first Winter Soldier gathering in 1971, the United States had reached a point in the war that was very similar to what's going on today. Public opinion had moved decidedly against the war, coalition partners like Australia and New Zealand were withdrawing their troops, and the Pentagon Papers, which had just been released, documented a long history of official lies. And yet the war continued, with President Richard Nixon pushing ahead with an expansion of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, which included the invasion of Cambodia.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War were determined to play a role in changing that. They gathered in Detroit to explain what they had really done when they were deployed overseas serving their countries. They showed, through their first-person testimony, that atrocities like the My Lai massacre were not isolated exceptions.
Among those in attendance was 27-year-old Navy Lt. John Kerry, who had served on a Swift boat in Vietnam. Three months after the hearings, Kerry took his case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats.
"Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia," Kerry told the committee, describing the events of the Winter Soldier gathering. "It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do."
In one of the most famous anti-war speeches of the era, Kerry concluded: "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be -- and these are his words -- 'the first president to lose a war.' We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hoped their Winter Soldier would play a similarly historic role. So far, however, they've run up against a nearly complete media blackout. Though March's gathering was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was held in Silver Spring, Maryland, less than 10 miles from the White House, the personal testimony of hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans garnered scant coverage. The Washington Post buried an article on Winter Soldier in the Metro section. The New York Times¸ CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS ignored it completely.
Each of those outlets also passed on covering the Progressive Caucus forum on Winter Soldier, and, so far, no standing committee of the House or Senate has extended an invitation to IVAW like the one extended to John Kerry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its prestigious chair, William Fulbright.
Iraq War veterans have expressed some hope that former Marine and Iraq War critic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania might schedule a hearing in his Defense Appropriation's Subcommittee. But a spokesperson for Murtha told The American Prospect that his boss was busy shepherding the latest war-funding bill through Congress. After that, he said, Murtha will be focused on approving the rest of the Pentagon's $550 billion annual budget.
Veterans I've spoken with find these developments upsetting but not discouraging. Many say it's more important to organize within the ranks of the military than inside the halls of Congress.
Many observers believe the Army is already close to its breaking point. In March, Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff said, "The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance."
Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that cutting the time soldiers spend in combat is an integral part of reducing the stress on the force. Last year, Senate Republicans and President George W. Bush sabotaged Democratic attempts to ensure troops as much rest time at home as they spent on their most recent tour overseas. Cycling troops through three or four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the only way Bush has been able to maintain a force of over 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Many of IVAW's most active members are veterans who served one tour in Iraq and then filed for conscientious-objector status or went AWOL to avoid a second deployment.
"We don't need to rely on the mainstream media," said Aaron Hughes, a former Illinois National Guardsman who drove convoys in Iraq. "We're building up this community that's saying: 'I don't have to follow these illegal orders. I do have a voice. And you know what, I'm not going to let a politician or a general or the media speak for me anymore. Let me tell you what's really going on.'" Hughes added, "Let's have those conversations in public, and together as a community we can end this war, because you know what -- when the soldiers stop fighting this war, the war's over."
Indeed, immediately following the Congressional Progressive Caucus hearing, a U.S. Army sergeant, Matthis Chiroux, announced he was refusing orders to deploy to Iraq in July. Chiroux said the idea of a deployment to Iraq initially made him suicidal. "I just went into my room and shut the door and barely emerged for close to a month. I just sat in my room reading news about Iraq and feeling completely hopeless, like I would be forced to go and no one would ever know how I felt. I was getting looped into participating in a crime against humanity and all with the realization that I never wanted to be there in the first place."
The turning point, Chiroux said, came when one of his professors at Brooklyn College in New York suggested he listen to a broadcast of March's Winter Soldier hearings.
"Here's an organization of soldiers and veterans who feel like me," he said. "All this alienation and depression that I feel started to ease. I found them, and I've been speaking out with them ever since."
